Not Another Paradox

We humans have spent the last few hundred years very earnestly, carefully, and diligently building a world where it is ever easier to move about efficiently, comfortably, and conveniently in order to obtain all of the things we want or need.  From groceries to manila envelopes to lipstick to health care to haircuts, to you-name-it, everything we seem to require or desire has become ever more interconnected via a superbly organized carefully constructed highly engineered system of roads, rails, and other mobility augmentation technologies. Including ever-improving motorcycles and rider’s gear. After centuries of work and an incalculably large investment, getting stuff and going places has never been easier, safer, and more comfortable. But in this pursuit maybe we’re about to be like the proverbial dog that chases passing cars until one day finally catching one and is bewildered because it doesn’t know what to do with it. If the car had been a rabbit, and the dog had been a wolf, it would be a meal. But those days for dogs are long gone.

It is an important difference. Suddenly, after making everything easy to obtain and every place easy to get to, all a lot of us want to do is stay home and have stuff brought to us, assuming it is within our means to afford. The next level of convenience and luxury is to have everything delivered. Nice, but what does this teach us?

It’s not narrowly about the advent of the internet, the smartphone, online retail, and social media. Nor is it about lessons from the recent Covid pandemic/plague. Nor the aging demographics of richer more advanced cultures. Nope, none of that. Rather it is about our insatiable desire for control and comfort. We simply enjoy our comforts and one of them is the calming security of familiar surroundings. We are comfort seekers above all else.

Having everything brought to you is simply what comes next. On a silver platter, if possible, and by uniformed well-groomed footmen. It’s what royalty and privilege have always been about. “Farmboy, peel me a grape.” “As you wish…”  Consuming acts of service is the ultimate convenience and luxury.

When I was a little boy, going for a ride with Mom and Dad after work meant fun, and possibly an ice cream cone along the way. The family all happily piled into the car, rolled the windows down, and off we went into a great unknown. Sometimes this involved visiting relatives, occasionally it involved shopping or exploring, but most of the time it was simply sightseeing with a stop for ice cream somewhere. Can you imagine any of this happening in an American family today?

For whatever reason, the coolest thing about moving myself through the world behind the handlebars of a motorcycle involves managing the logistics and kinesthetics more than the destinations or scenery. I enjoy the calm comforts of home as much as the next person but I also enjoy the experience of riding greatly enough to prefer a trip to a store or workplace over ordering whatever is needed online. It always makes me feel better to ride there, and then return home with whatever I’d gone out for. Could this be partly why heating with self-gathered wood when camping feels so nice?

Sitting securely inside the safe comfortable near-hermetically sealed capsule of a modern car, I almost may as well have ordered the ______ (whatever) from the comfort of my home. About fifty years ago Bob Dylan sang:“Something’s happening here and I don’t know what it is.”  I don’t know what it is either, Bob. But whatever it is, it sure as hell is something.